After rising to become one of the top players in the database market, MongoDB Inc. now looks to extend its reach to other parts of the software stack.

The company pulled back the curtains on a new service today called MongoDB Stitch that aims to ease the task of building application backends using its document store. Besides a database to hold information, modern services also require numerous other supporting components to process user requests and handle related tasks. Cobbling together these building blocks into a working server-side environment has historically cost a great deal of time for application teams.

MongoDB Stitch provides the ability to quickly incorporate external components into a project using ready-made integrations. The platform supports Amazon Web Services Inc., Slack Technologies Inc., Facebook Inc. and several other popular services on launch, a lineup that MongoDB can be expected to expand over time. Moreover, developers who don’t want to wait on the company to add the connectors they need may create their own using a built-in HTTP connectivity tool.

Once an application team has assembled the necessary services, they can be managed using a centralized set of controls that also extend to the MongoDB database. One of the areas where MongoDB Stitch promises to make the biggest impact is security.

The platform integrates with popular authentication services and provides the ability to limit what data an application can access to only the records that it absolutely requires. The latter feature lets companies employ a single MongoDB Stitch-powered backend to power multiple workloads, which can help reduce duplicate infrastructure. For added measure, the MongoDB database and third-party services that make up an environment are exposed through a unified programming interface to make it easy to hook up new services.

MongoDB is making the backend as a service platform available as part of MongoDB Atlas, its managed database offering. That product entered the spotlight as well at the company’s Chicago user conference today thanks to a major new update. Besides Amazon Web Services Inc.’s cloud, the database can now also be deployed on Microsoft Corp.’s Azure and Google Cloud Platform, which should give it a much bigger addressable market.

Atlas is already used by thousands of companies such as eHarmony Inc. and Thermo Fisher Scientific. MongoDB plans to carry over the new backend-as-a-service platform to the on-premises edition of its database in the future to reach more potential customers.

MongoDB is not the first dataset maker that is trying its hands at easing server-side operations. Realm Inc., the startup behind the hugely popular mobile SQL store of the same name, recently introduced a backend as a service offering of its own that targets iOS and Android developers.

Image: MongoDB